In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, master data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Ylann Schemm, Vice President for Corporate Responsibility at the leading academic publisher, Elsevier, home to almost 3,000 academic journals, specialising in scientific, technical, and medical content. Elsevier describes itself as “an information analytics” business – so right up our alley here at Data Malarkey.

In a career with the publisher spanning almost two decades, Ylann has been on a remarkable journey of both personal and corporate development, moving from communications to corporate relations and from there into corporate responsibility. And for more than a decade, she has been a leading figure in the Elsevier Foundation, first as Program Director – running the Foundation’s New Scholars program designed to expand the participation of women in STEM – and since 2017 as its Director.

Under Ylann’s leadership, the Foundation is taking pioneering steps and making a tangible difference. This is manifested most clearly in the organisation’s regular, data-driven reporting into gender and diversity in research. The latest, 2024 report showed that, although as many as 41% of all academic researchers today are women, this is much lower in STEM subjects. At the current rate of change, parity is not expected to be reached until 2052.

Ylann was allowed to lay the – shall we say? – foundations for the Foundation’s work in “a climate of benign neglect” as she found her feet and built networks and partnerships inside and outside of Elsevier. But it was with the 2019 arrival of the company’s first female CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, that Ylann’s work moved front and centre of the publisher’s strategic vision.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ylann’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ylann-schemm-a5a3632/

Elsevier home page – https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb

The Elsevier Foundation – https://elsevierfoundation.org

2024 Elsevier Foundation gender and diversity in research report – https://www.elsevier.com/en-au/insights/gender-and-diversity-in-research

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

Using data smarter is an attitude of mind. It’s characterised by those who choose to communicate simply, clearly, and effectively, by making sense of the signals and cutting out the noise. Above all, it’s about empathy, humanity, and appreciating the likely data tolerance of your audience.

After our fifth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Five of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between February and May 2024.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Five, our guests included:

Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

Olivia Jensen, Deputy Director and Lead Scientist at the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk based out of the University of Singapore.

Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director for Marketing Effectiveness at Mars (who’s also the Marketing Engineer).

Ian Whittaker, founder of Liberty Sky Advisors, the award-winning city analyst specialising in media and marketing.

John Hibbs, Co-Founder of CoEfficient, a software as a service company that helps organisations grow by measuring performance from the human perspective.

And Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University, and director of the Autism Research Centre.

Data Malarkey is taking an extended summer vacation and is having all of August off – and then some. We’ll be back with Season Six on 11 September 2024 with another eclectic group of guests from an ever-more diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of publishing, consumer goods, political punditry in the wake of the U.K. General Election, journalism, neuroscience, and numeracy. As usual, their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with Ylann Schemm who is both the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility for Elsevier, the world’s leading scientific publisher and data analytics company, and Director of the Elsevier Foundation.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he also runs the Autism Research Centre. Simon has been working in the field of autism for approaching 40 years and is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject.

Since the mid-1980s, the research he’s led and undertaken has led him to advance several different, complementary theories of the condition including: the mind-blindness theory, the prenatal sex steroid theory, and the empathising-systemising theory of autism and typical sex differences.

Some corners of autism research have a somewhat shady and disreputable reputation for their misuse of data; for drawing conclusions about the general population from tiny sample sizes that the data could not warrant. Indeed, it was in the wake of the MMR scandal that the charity Sense About Science was founded in the early 2000s – to encourage researchers to present their findings responsibly and the media to report them responsibly – and Sense About Science’s director, Tracey Brown, was a recent guest on Data Malarkey.

By contrast with the shady stuff, Simon’s research has been a shining light of empiricism and evidence-based, data-driven truth, with sample sizes sometimes in the tens or hundreds of thousands. His 2018, empathising-systemising study famously collected data from 36,000 autistic people and 600,000 non-autistic people.

Described by the medical journal The Lancet as “a man with extraordinary knowledge … his passionate advocacy for a more tolerant, diverse society, where difference is respected and cultivated, reveals a very human side to his science” it is our honour to welcome Simon to Data Malarkey. A very fitting, very high-profile end to Season Five, a season bookended by two great Cambridge minds, as we started with Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter.

To secure Simon as a guest on Data Malarkey, I’m delighted to say I had to drop my son Max’s name. At the time of recording, Max had recently hosted Simon at an excellent event run by the recently-reborn Cambridge Psychology Society, of which Max is now President. At the university, he is studying Psychological & Behavioural Sciences. #proudfather

EXTERNAL LINKS

Profile of Simon on The Lancet – Psychiatry site https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00461-7/fulltext

The Autism Research Centre https://www.autismresearchcentre.com

The extraordinary output of 750+ articles from the Autism Research Centre on PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=simon+baron-cohen&sort=date

Auticon, the social enterprise on a mission to improve the employment prospects of neurodivergent people, whose board Simon advises https://auticon.com/uk/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.